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Thomas Hardy: Between the Scylla of the Genes and the Charybdis of The Syrian Arab Republic Tishreen University Faculty of Arts English Department Thomas Hardy: Between the Scylla of the Genes and the Charybdis of the Memes In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master in Arts By: Rawa Zrekah Supervised by: Dr. Ahmad Al-Issa Summer 2018 Dedication I dedicate this work to those who believed in me: My great Father My loving Mother My patient Husband My supporting Sisters and Brothers And to your pure soul… My unforgettable Meray. With My Love Acknowledgements Although I was not the perfect student, you were the perfect supervisor. Thanks for your invaluable moral support. I am also grateful to all my doctors at the English Department, Tishreen University especially Dr. Abeer Zahra and Dr. Susie Gharib. Their reading of the dissertation is a rebirth of it. Thomas Hardy: Between the Scylla of the Genes and the Charybdis of the Memes Abstract ………………………………………………….1 I. Introduction A. Merciless Memes ………………………………………. 2 B. The Literature of Memes ……………………………… 9 C. “Steel Traps” ………………………………………….. 19 II. Jude the Obscure A. The Unbreakable Bubble ……………………………… 24 B. Survival of the Submissive ……………………………. 29 C. Social-Construction and Self-Destruction ………….. 40 D. Membots: Agents of Conformity ……………………. 49 E. Mesmerized Memoids …………………………………. 65 F. Negating the Power of Negation …………………….. 87 III. Conclusion “Individuality”: A Trojan Horse ………………………... 111 Works Cited ……………………………………………...... 115 Zrekah Abstract Between what the characters of Thomas Hardy think they know and what they do not know lies their inevitable tragedy. They strongly believe that they are men and women. They do not know that they are nothing but membots and memoids. They think that they run their own lives but they do not realize that they are lifeless. The stronger the illusion, the stronger the confusion. Individuality is an illusion and freedom is an illusion to the extent that identity itself becomes a delusion. At the very end, characters discover that they are puppets not persons, and pawns not people. Either they bow or they perish. It is not only genes; it is memes. It is not just heredity; it is society. It is not simply biology; it is ideology. It is not exclusively in the blood; it is in the head. The snare, as Hardy says, is ―in the air‖ (Hardy, 1999, 91). Memes are the social units that circulate and transform people into membots. These membots may metamorphose later into sacrificial memoids. The world consists of memplexes and the atmosphere is nothing but an ideosphere. Memes reinforce social homogeneity and demolish individual heterogeneity. The dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter One is the introduction. It presents the theory of Memetics. It explains its basics and defines its major terms. Chapter Two discusses Jude the Obscure. It is divided into six parts for six different issues. This chapter demonstrates that characters do not possess ideas. Ideas possess characters. The human tragedy is human hauntology. Arabella is a membot. Sue is a memoid and Jude is both. Chapter Three is the conclusion. It displays that society is a blackhole, from which nothing can escape, not even light (Mambrol, 2017). The aim of the dissertation is to reread Jude from the new perspective of Memetics. ―To meme or not to meme,‖ as Elizabeth Penning says, ―that is the question‖ (2018). 1 Zrekah I. Introduction: A. Merciless Memes In the beginning was the Meme. Memes and co-memes are ubiquitous units boasting a potent viral nature. They hover within the sphere of a cultural system. They form a unified mass of memeplexes controlling and directing the course of a particular social construction. Burdened by the prevailing memes, humans are entrapped as meme-vehicles. Their vocation is to maintain, propagate, transmit, receive, accept and act upon uncountable sets of memes, called memeplexes. Under memetic hegemony, being a proper ―member‖ in society requires being a positive meme-bearer. ―[H]umans,‖ stresses Susan Blackmore, the memetic theorist, in her The Meme Machine (1999), ―because of [their] powers of imitation, have become just the physical ‗hosts‘ needed for the memes to get around‖ (Blackmore, 1999, 8). Being so overwhelming, meme-infection is inescapable and ―memeticization‖ is unstoppable (my term). Although coined in Richard Dawkins‘ The Selfish Gene (1976), the ―meme‖ has progressively developed a charisma of its own. ―[T]unes, ideas, catch-phrases,‖ and ―clothes fashions‖ are some of Dawkins‘ examples of memes (Dawkins, 1989, 192). These contagious ―units of cultural transmission,‖ as Blackmore identifies them in her introduction to ―Imitation and the Definition of a Meme‖ (1998), manage their continuous spread travelling from mind to mind mainly by means of imitation and copying (Blackmore, 1998). Blackmore re-stresses the definition of memes as ―[b]ehaviors and ideas copied from person to person by imitation‖ (Blackmore, 2000, 64). Dawkins continues explaining that, ―[t]he medium of transmission is human influence of various kinds, the spoken and written word, personal example and so on‖ (198). Using different terms, Glenn Grant defines a meme, in his ―Memetic 2 Zrekah Lexicon‖ (1990), as ―a contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern‖ (Grant, 1990). They dynamically circulate within a cultural structure. Memes are imperceptible entities that materialize only in the behavior of a particular person within his/her environment. Only through this substantiation, memeticization is fully observed and adequately examined. Memes evolve and progress with regard to the general social mode to which they hugely contribute. Throughout their dissemination, memes seek to achieve conformity in every community. Social construction is based on a process of stereotype construction and monotype destruction. The mass of memes forms a kind of cultural pattern upon which the concept of ―cultural heredity‖ is based. Memes are autonomous units. Still, they live in symbiosis with their human hosts. Humans develop or retrograde when the encoding of a particular meme is successfully accomplished in their mental faculties. The spread of a meme depends on its hosts and the infection strategies through which it controls these hosts. Within a meme-infected ideosphere, humans are necessarily either active or inactive meme-carriers. However, the meme-mechanism reveals continuous metalepsis. Meme-hosts keep swapping roles; membots play memoids and memoids play membots exchanging influence by incessant infection. Unavoidably, they are all meme-targets. A critical battle is launched between the individual and the society. Continuous social interaction provides the proper and fertile ground for meme- infection. It marks the most distinguished contamination tactic. People fail to resist the on-going contamination strategies and turn into propagating membots. 3 Zrekah Individuals, no matter how powerful, are powerless in front of the unabashed memes which eternally seek to engulf them. Replication and imitation represent the integral media of meme-transmission. Based on these methods of transmission, the components of a particular community are either membots or memoids. According to the memetic dichotomy, some hosts play the ―membots.‖ Membots represent the active instruments of meme- propagation. The concept is defined by Grant as someone who ―has become subordinated to the propagation of a meme, robotically and at any opportunity‖ (Grant, 1990). Membots are self-assigned agents whose ultimate aim is to spread a meme and infect others with it. Memoids are usually the indefensible victims of the un-defiable membots. They are the recipients of the viral units. According to Grant, these are people ―whose behavior is so strongly influenced by a [meme] that their own survival becomes inconsequential in their own minds.‖ Some memoids display a serious suicidal drive under the effect of their meme-infection. They develop a nihilistic propensity that necessarily leads to their demise. Contaminated hosts eternally transmit memes to new hosts. The unconscious infection occurs when the fixed memes are internalized within a host‘s consciousness and manifested in his/her imitative conduct. According to ―cultural evolution,‖ society follows a selectionist method. It stresses and reinforces the memes that stress and reinforce its authority. It employs censorship as well to eliminate less conforming memes from the overall ideosphere. The goal is to control the individuals‘ belief-space. These ―individuals‖ radically change into mere membots whose demeanors reflect their subordination to their memes and echo their function in meme-propagation. Closely-limited belief-spaces characterize 4 Zrekah memoids in particular. Their life and welfare are insignificant when regarded in the shadow of meme-propagation. Generally, these belief-spaces are occupied by memes related to the social laws entrapping humans. Memes go through a selection process where the ―fittest‖ memes, in the social sense, survive. This selection method is based on the competitive nature of memes. Memes compete over the finite belief-spaces of potential hosts. The publicly- accepted memes overpower and eliminate the private convictions. Memes go through society‘s sieving machine. Some memes are disqualified conferring advantage to other memes ready to occupy the outcome void. The ideosphere is defined by the code competition. Memes compete ―for niches in the belief-space
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